Kumikata and ashi-sabaki interact and inform

Here's where all this talk of gripping becomes really generalizable to judo, aikido, and even into everyday life...

• If you are holding onto something that is keeping you from expressing gracefully, let go of it.
• If you are standing in a place or in a way that makes it hard for you to express gracefully, move.
• If your hands are getting in the way of you moving your feet gracefully, let go and move.
• If your footwork is making you feel like you have to latch on with your hands, let go and move.
• If you are standing in the wrong place for your technique, you're standing in the wrong place.  Gripping harder won't cure that.
• If your hands are gripping convulsively, you'll never get your feet (much less your center) to move gracefully.

If you study kumikata (gripping), then you should, as part of that study, pay close attention to your footwork.  If, like me, you are OCD about your footwork, you should pay attention to how your hands are helping or hindering your footwork.

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Get your hands and your feet working gracefully, and everything in-between will work gracefully.

photo courtesy of Judy Van Der Velden

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Patrick Parker
www.mokurendojo.com

Live where you've landed

One of the exercises we obsess most about in aikido is the walking exercise - also known as tegatana or tandoku undo or unsoku, etc...  This exercise is complex enough that we are always making little adjustments and tweaks to try to get the thing right (whatever "right" is - nobody's ever achieved it yet).

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One of the interesting properties of this exercise, is whenever you focus on correcting or improving one particular aspect, much of the rest of the thing falls into chaos.  Sorta like trying to stack sand into a pyramid - you try to put one grain in the right place and half the pile sloughs down the side and you have to start re-building the whole thing with that one grain placed properly.

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Lately I've been focusing on getting off my heels so that I'm bearing my weight on the balls of my feet.  Actually I thought I'd always done that but I'd become lax and my heels had been bearing progressively more weight without me noticing.  So, I've been focusing on getting off my heels and the rest of the thing has fallen to chaos.

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Today I think I'm ready to try to get weight-off-heels and another piece right at the same time! Yay me!

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So, for a while we'll be working on bearing weight on the balls of the feet and living where you land.  That is, when you make a movement, you've got to attempt to deal with wherever you placed your feet - no extra little weight shifts to try to get a little more comfortable on your feet.  You've got to either place them correctly the first time, every time, or learn to live where you've landed.

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Patrick Parker 

www.mokurendojo.com

Evasion month recap

This month has been evasion month at Mokuren Dojo.  Well, ok, actually every month (every class) is an emphasis on evasion at Mokuren Dojo, but I've written a good bit about the topics of evasion, taisabaki, and footwork this month.  I think the most important thing to remember is that it's important to work carefully and thoughtfully on making your footwork and evasions efficient because during an attack you don't have time to get... out... of... the... way... - you gotta "get out 'da way!"

• Falling out of the way
• More on falling out of the way
• Walking over the hill
• When stepping is faster than falling
• Whether to fall or step over the hill
• Power and consistency in evasion
• The cowcatcher
• Push back from a fight - the aiki-brushoff
• Don't step back
• Don't step forward
• Smaller steps
• Don't neglect the inside condition

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Patrick Parker, is a Christian, husband, father, judo and aikido teacher, Program Director for a Cardiac Rehab, and a Ph.D. Contact: mokurendojo@gmail.com or phone 601.248.7282
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Don't neglect the inside condition

Photo courtesy of Kubina

When you are making a study of evasion, as we are this month, You inevitably get into a discussion of shikaku, the "dead angle." This is sort of like a blind spot behind uke's shoulder where, if you stand there it is relatively hard for uke to attack you. It doesn't take long for beginner martial arts students to figure out that it is preferable to evade to the outside, toward shikaku, behind the arm, than to evade inside toward the space between the attacker's arms.

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But, it is difficult without foreknowledge of the attack, for tori to choose whether he evades inside or outside. In the heat of the moment, when jumped, hopefully tori just steps out of the way and puts his hands up. He might end up inside or outside. It's probably not exactly 50/50 chance of inside/outside, but a significant portion of time you end up inside the attack instead of in the preferred position outside.

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Point is, you cannot neglect dealing with the inside condition in practice because you will end up there a significant portion of the time. Even though you prefer the outside condition (shikaku), you'd better spend some time learning how to survive on the inside. This is why we start our beginners learning shomenate as a solution for tori having stepped inside.

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Patrick Parker, is a Christian, husband, father, judo and aikido teacher, Program Director for a Cardiac Rehab, and a Ph.D. Contact: mokurendojo@gmail.com or phone 601.248.7282
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Smaller, more conservative steps

Photo courtesy of Rutty

The topic of the month is evasion.  We are making a deliberate study of how to step out of  the way of an incoming attack. Check back through this month's archives to see some of the previous posts.  Today I wanted to add a small detail - that is, a detail about small steps.

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You want to take small, conservative steps out of the way. Avoid huge, lunging evasions.  Consider Mifune's famous beachball lecture.  If you take a beachball and kick it dead center, it acquires a lot of energy and flies a long way.  But if you kick it tangent to its surface, barely grazing it, it mostly just stays in place spinning.  Even if you get slightly off-center your energy will go, to a large extent, into spinning the ball instead of sailing it.

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The same goes for evading an attack.  Even if you only get partially out of the way, you will be in a much better position than had you stayed put.  The energy you take from the attack will be greatly decreased and off-target. (But it will still pay you dividends to put on some boxing gloves sometime and learn to take a hit).

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So, if you only have to get slightly out of the way to disrupt an attack greatly, you can afford to take smaller steps, rendering you faster and more stable.  We train this by cutting a square of paper the width of your stance (slightly narrower than hip width) and doing footwork exercises referencing off of the corners of the square.

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Patrick Parker, is a Christian, husband, father, judo and aikido teacher, Program Director for a Cardiac Rehab, and a Ph.D. Contact: mokurendojo@gmail.com or phone 601.248.7282

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Don't step forward

Photo courtesy of Amerigoland

A year or two ago, an instructor who has been doing judo for a long, long time gave my class a rule of thumb to watch for in judo randori and shiai. I was surprised because I'd never noticed this particular phenomenon before. What he said was:

• Larger players don't like to move forward. They tend to hang back and pull because when they advance they are more easily loaded up on top of hip throws and shoulder throws.
• Smaller players don't like to move backward because they get overwhelmed by the advancing larger guy.

As I said, I hadn't noticed, but I've watched for it since then and haven't really found enough evidence to support it as a rule or to refute it. I agree that I personally, as a larger-than-average player, like to hang back and wait, but that may just be me.

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Have you guys noticed any patterns like this in randori or shiai?

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Patrick Parker, is a Christian, husband, father, judo and aikido teacher, Program Director for a Cardiac Rehab, and a Ph.D. Contact: mokurendojo@gmail.com or phone 601.248.7282

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Don't step back

Photo courtesy of Tharso

This month, we've been focussing on the initial evasion in our aikido classes and on this blog. Today I wanted to follow up with a quick addition to the articles I've already written on the topic, and that is, avoid moving backward.

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This is not revolutionary - lots of my instructors have told me that you don't ever step straight back in response to an attack - but it is important. There are several problems with this...

• If you step straight back, you are not solving the problem. The attack is still coming at you, you are still directly on the line of attack, and now he has more momentum.
• the attacker can always move faster forward than you can move backward.
• Because of the shape of your feet and the position of your eyes, you are inherently less stable moving backward then forward.
• You can't see what you are about to trip over when you walk backward.

But it seems from my previous post on pushing back from a fight, that I am contradicting myself. On the one hand, in that post I said that to get good effect in aikido you pretty much have to be trying to evade and step back outside of ma-ai (and I stand by that). Also, this advice to not move backward seems to be at odds with the tenkan motion (turning backward around the attack) that seems to make up about half of aikido. So, how does that work?

• Always evade offline first, before stepping back.
• I would recommend minimizing the number of backward steps that you take when brushing off of uke. 1-2 tends to be enough to get outside ma-ai. If you have to take a step backward to get out of ma-ai, that's okay, but watch out and don't build up a lot of momentum.
• When doing tenkan, try doing repeated sidesteps directly toward uke's center instead of walking backward around uke. This gets you closer to the center of rotation, gets you into shikaku (uke's blind spot) quicker and more efficiently, and is much more stable than walking backward around uke.

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Patrick Parker, is a Christian, husband, father, judo and aikido teacher, Program Director for a Cardiac Rehab, and a Ph.D. Contact: mokurendojo@gmail.com or phone 601.248.7282

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Push back from a fight

Photo courtesy of Abolotnov

This month we've been talking about evasion - particularly in the context of aikido. Even if you evade out of the way of the first attack, if you are still within the attacker's reach (especially if you are in front of him) then you are in trouble. You have to evade off the line of attack AND try to regain ma-ai distance between you and the attacker. The easiest way to do this that we've found is what we call the aiki brush-off.

• evade off the line of attack as he passes ma-ai.
• put your hands between you and him, as in the cowcatcher maneuver.
• use your hands to push yourself straight back away from the attacker. Push against whatever presents itself - arm, face, chest, shoulder, whatever. Take a step or two backward to re-establish ma-ai.
• If you can't get back away from the attacker then all your cool aikido techniques come into play, as sort of a bunch of backup plans for the aiki brushoff.

Point is, you pretty much have to be trying to do the aiki brush-off to get those good, feather-light, smooth, magical aikido techniques to happen. If you are not at least trying to brush off of the attacker then you are probably trying to stand and fight within his reach and that is a recipe for disaster.

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Patrick Parker, is a Christian, husband, father, judo and aikido teacher, Program Director for a Cardiac Rehab, and a Ph.D. Contact: mokurendojo@gmail.com or phone 601.248.7282

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To fall or to step over the hill?

In a previous post on walking, I broke the walking cycle down into four events for discussion. Here is another way of thinking about the same thing.

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Whenever one of your feet is weightbearing, one of two things is happening...

• your center is moving toward your non-weightbearing (free-moving) leg
• your center is moving toward your weightbearing (stuck) leg

The first condition is when it is approipriate and efficient to fall out of the way. The second condition is when it is appropriate and efficient to step over the hill to get out of the way.

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The cowcatcher

I've written a lot about getting out of the way - the first and probably most important idea that you learn in aikido. Now I begin working on how to integrate these ideas into the rest of the aikido that we're doing. I'm going to talk about an idea that I call, "The Cowcatcher."

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A cowcatcher, in old railroad parlance was an angled grate welded onto the front of an engine that was designed to pick stray cows up off the railroad tracks and throw them to the side so they didn't get hung up under the wheels and derail the train. A cowcatcher is a fender or a deflector or a flying wedge. We use a maneuver I call, "The Cowcatcher" at the beginning of nearly all aikido techniques (at least all frontal attacks). Here's how you do it:

• close both hands into tegatana (a.k.a. shuto or spearhand) shapes so that you don't break you fingers against uke's arms.
• point your spear-hands together in front of your belt with unbendable arms
• as you evade out of the way, sweep both arms upward between uke's face and yours, both arms still unbendable

In effect this is a double rising block (as in karate - think the middle of Bassai Dai) that is blindly swept through the center line of the relationship. it has several benefits, much like the old railroad cowcatchers...

• it occupies the centerline that uke has to come through to hit you
• it tends to deflect any attacks coming at you
• it tends to leave tori's arms in contact with uke's arms, so that it is easier to grab in preparation for some technique
• it can clear some space for tori to walk around in
• having hands thrown in his face disrupts uke's attack and makes him hesitate

I recommend that if you don't typically use the cowcatcher in your practice, consider this exercise - do whatever aikido or jujitsu techniques or karate one-steps you practice but make the first move a step off the line of attack combined with this cowcatcher motion. That is...

• get out 'da way
• do the cowcatcher motion
• now, do your cool jujitsu/karate move

I think you will find that your techniques become much more robust, general-purpose, and fail-soft if you add the cowcatcher to the front of them. Try it and let me know how it goes.

Photo courtesy of PSD

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Power and consistency in evasion

Photo courtesy of Yelnoc

In a previous post on gett'n out 'da way, I characterized trying to lunge, or push yourself out of the way as “feeble and inconsistent,” as compared to turning a leg off and falling out of the way. I'd like to expand on that some.
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First, consider the position of your legs with respect to your center of balance. In whatever stance you want to put yourself in, your legs are mostly vertical below your center. That means that they are positioned such that the only thing they can do well is push against the ground to lift your center. You can expend a ton of energy with your legs and not get much horizontal motion. Basically, the only thing that pushing with your legs does, is jumps you into the air. Pushing with your legs is a terribly inefficient way to get out of the way.

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Also, consider this, it is hard, if not impossible, to push the same way, with the same strength several times in a row. Your muscles fatigue, the joint angles change, your balance changes, and all this lends to your speed of evasion being inconsistent. Sometimes you push hard and move slow. Sometimes you push more weakly and move somewhat faster. The upshot: you never know how much time it takes to get out of the way (i.e. to move your center 18 or so inches). On the other hand, gravity always works at the same speed, and if you learn how to collapse and fall out of the way from from shizentai, it takes very close to the same amount of time every repetition. You have a constant understanding of how much time it takes you to get out 'da way, which, when compared to a good innate knowledge of ma-ai makes for a very powerful evasion skill.
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How is stepping faster than falling?

We usually emphasize falling out of the way as the best way to evade off the line of attack, but it turns out that walking over the hill, as I covered in a previous post, is actually faster and more efficient than falling out of the way. Consider this...

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When you fall out of the way, you collapse a leg (let's say the right one) and you begin to fall to the right. Then you put your right leg back down under you and draw your left leg under you. In stepping over the hill, you stick a weightbearing leg and as your momentum is carrying you upward onto that leg, you step across with the free leg.

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About the shortest unit of movement that is worth discussing much is a half a gait cycle, during which you have moved a foot and shifted weight over it but haven't yet moved the other foot. If you look at both types of evasion, you find that by ½ a gait cycle into the evasion, the falling step has only moved you partially out of the way. Your trailing leg is still in the way. The over-the-hill step, though, has moved you completely out of the way within a half gait cycle. So, the over-the-hill step is nearly twice as fast/efficient as the falling step.

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This speed/efficiency advantage serves as a good justification (but not the only good one) for starting the first two wrist releases the way we do (stepping over the hill) instead of starting them the way that feels natural for nearly all beginners (falling out of the way).

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Walking over the hill

Photo courtesy of JommeV

This month's dojo theme is evasion – getting out of the way. In a previous post I talked about how we typically teach to fall out of the way, letting gravity take over and power our movement instead of trying to lunge out of the way under our own feeble, inconsistent power. Well, it turns out that there is an exception to this idea of falling out of the way.

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Take a slow walk across the room using a normal gait and watch what happens. You are always in one of four conditions:

• standing on right foot, falling toward left foot
• standing on left foot, falling toward right foot
• your right foot just hit and is stuck, but your momentum is still carrying you toward your right
• your left foot just hit and is stuck, but your momentum is still carrying you toward your left

The first two conditions occupy most of the time in your walking cycle, and these are the conditions under which it is appropriate to fall out of the way. For instance, if you are attacked when you are standing on your right foot falling toward your left foot, then you just extend that left footstep and fall out of the way.

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But what about the second two conditions. If your right foot has just hit and is stuck but your momentum is still carrying you rightward, you can't easily unstick that right foot to move. (This is the condition that Dan Prager mentioned in his comment to the previous post.) To solve this problem, you have to do the evasion by stepping with your unweighted foot toward your weighted side. If you practice this several times, you'll get the feeling that you are stepping over a hill (your stuck foot being the hill).

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This is the type of evasion used in the first 180 degree turn in the walking kata (Tegatana no kata) as well as the type of evasion taught in the first and second wrist releases (Hanasu).

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It turns out that this walking over the hill step is actually faster and more efficient than the falling out of the way step - stay tuned for more on walking over the hill.

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Two more hints on falling out 'da way

A couple of people have emailed me talking about what a weird concept falling out of the way is.  Here are a couple of more hints on how to get the feel of the thing:

• Fall all the way down - Get a crash pad or a mattress or something to that effect.  Stand in shizentai with the crash pad beside you and practice collapsing the leg and just falling on your side on the crash pad.  This is the first part of the falling evasion I was talking about in the previous post.  Once you become comfortable with the falling part you can start catching yourself before you fall all the way and you'll be falling out of the way.
• March like a robot - When you get the feel of falling and start using that collapsed leg to catch you, try a few repetitions of picking the leg straight up and putting it straight back down under you like a piston.  When you are ready to fall, instead of collapsing the leg and dragging the floor with it, snap the foot upward off the floor, then when you want to put it back down, snap it back down.  After you get the feel for this falling evasion you can tone it down so that you are not walking like a robot, but try it a few times to get used to it.

I've got another great hint on this evasion business coming up that will likely solve some of your problems with this falling evasion.  Stay tuned for a post on what I call, "Walking over the hill."

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Falling out of the way

Aikido is about avoidance, evasion - getting out of the way. Thus this month's dojo focus - "Get out 'da way!" First thing that I want to mention about gett'n out 'da way, is that you usually want to fall out of the way instead of stepping out of the way. Obviously you don't fall all to the way to the ground, as in ukemi, but you want your evasive motion to be powered by gravity because it is far easier and faster to turn a leg off and drop out of the way than it is to jump or lunge or push yourself out of the way with your legs.
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So, how do you do it? Take wakiashi (sidestep) as an example:

• Starting in shizentai (natural upright posture) with your feet side-by-side and about hip-width apart or maybe a little closer.
• Turn off the muscles in the leg closest to the direction you want to go. You begin to collapse to that side.
• pick up the foot on the side toward which you are collapsing.
• When your hips or center have moved about as far as you want them to, put that foot back down (ball of foot first) right under your center and catch your fall.
• As your center starts to rise over the foot you just put down, draw your other leg back under your center so that you end in shizentai, just like you started.

Falling out of the way - not stepping.

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Get out 'da way!

Having covered relaxation in January, posture in February, and ma-ai in March, I'm sure y'all are all clamoring to know what our principle of the month for April will be. Well, clamor no more.

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April is Get out 'da Way! month

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Why "get out 'da way!" you ask? Because, as my instructor once told us, you don't have time to "get... out... of... the... way..." You gotta "get out 'da way!"

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All month long we'll be covering ways to evade and avoid efficiently and quickly - ways to get out 'da way!

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The aiki-handshake

Photo courtesy of OoohOooh

I've talked in a couple of posts this past week about defining and measuring ma-ai very precisely so that you can build up a good intuitive sense of that distance and so that you can ingrain the habit of stepping aside whenever someone is at that distance.  We talk about measuring precisely and doing it consistently, but as Kyle pointed out in a comment to that post, we actually use that ma-ai sense much more loosely in a more complex way when both players are already in motion.

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Suppose uke and tori start 15-20 feet apart and walk together with uke's job to stride directly through tori's center and tori's job to evade at ma-ai.  Because of the arbitrary distance apart and the random step sizes, a couple of interesting things happen.

• Just before he reaches ma-ai, uke is very likely to change his tempo or his weight balance.  He is planning a foot to stride through with and he has to get that foot positioned correctly when he is just outside ma-ai.  Otherwise his stride-through will be wimpy.  Look for that glitch in his footwork - it is a pretty reliable indicator something is wrong with the guy who is about to be at ma-ai (i.e. he is an attacker).
• Tori is unable to wait until exactly ma-ai to begin his evasion.  Tori calculates which step will take him past ma-ai and begins the evasion with that last step.

So, because of the element of randomness added by having the partners approaching, our use of the ma-ai instinct that we have built is broader and looser.  You still have to know how big ma-ai is, and you still want a pretty precise intuition about that, but you have a fudge factor of about 1/4 to 1/2 of the length of your step.  So, in that context, I would agree with Kyle and Strange that how we measure or whether we measure every time is sorta arbitrary.

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Which brings me to one of the best ways I've found to ingrain that ma-ai reflex and get additional practice at measuring ma-ai outside the dojo - The aiki handshake.  Go back for a second to the definition I offered earlier for ma-ai as the distance at which uke can first start affecting you - the distance at which he can casually lean in and grab your extended wrist.  This is also about the range for a handshake.  So here's the exercise:

• Make it a habit to shake hands whenever you have the opportunity.  Do it firmly, with eye contact and genuine feeling.  You will develop a good spatial sense and goodwill just by doing that.
• As you step in to grasp their hand, shift your feet slightly to the outside of the hand they are reaching for you with.  As you clasp their hand, turn their palm slightly upward and use your free hand to touch or clasp their elbow or upper forearm.  This is a natural, genuine handshake but it provides you some protection from their free hand and also reduces their leverage if they are the type to want to crush your hand.
• As the handshake dies out and you both release, use your contact on the elbow to gently and unobtrusively push yourself back outside ma-ai.  Hold your conversation from here - outside ma-ai.

I think you will find that this will build a fine, dynamic ma-ai sense as well as creating an intuitive awareness in you of what a genuine person behaves like at ma-ai as opposed to someone with ulterior motives.

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Fantastic karate-do taisabaki

Magnificient karate! Aiki guys, check this out and see doesn't this trip you out! One of my big problems with karate-do the way it is often taught these days is the emphasis on standing still and generating power. In such a training environment, taisabaki (footwork, body shifting, evasions) is often assumed or just plain missing. But this is superb. If I remember my karate history rightly, this batch of karate guys separated from the Shotokan guys, claiming to be practising the stuff the way that Funakoshi actually wanted it done. I'm sure that the other side has their story, but IMO, this is much closer to karate-do done right.

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Old tegatana no kata video

This is an old clip of Tegatana no kata, our first exercise and the only solo exercise we do in aikido.  Not exactly how we do it, but you can see the new within the old (or vice versa).  The goal of the exercise is to learn the general motions that occur in aikido techniques, footwork, whole-body coordination, etc...

The steps between the steps

Here is another Musashi quote for us to think about – again, from his Wind book. This one is on walking methods. In aikido we define two walking methods – ayumiashi (normal walking) and tsugiashi (a dropping/sliding motion without crossing the feet). There are benefits to both, and for the most part, we walk using ayumiashi whenever we are outside of ma-ai, instantly switching to safer, more conservative tsugiashi as we cross into ma-ai. Here’s what Mushshi had to say about walking methods…

Use of the Feet in Other Schools

There are various methods of using the feet: floating foot, jumping foot, springing foot, treading foot, crow's foot, and such nimble walking methods. From the point of view of my strategy, these are all unsatisfactory.

I dislike floating foot because the feet always tend to float during the fight. The Way must be trod firmly.

Neither do I like jumping foot, because it encourages the habit of jumping, and a jumpy spirit. However much you jump, there is no real justification for it; so jumping is bad.

Springing foot causes a springing spirit which is indecisive.

Treading foot is a "waiting" method, and I especially dislike it.

Apart from these, there are various fast walking methods, such as crow's foot, and so on. Sometimes, however, you may encounter the enemy on marshland, swampy ground, river valleys, stony ground, or narrow roads, in which situations you cannot jump or move the feet quickly.

In my strategy, the footwork does not change. I always walk as I usually do in the street. You must never lose control of your feet. According to the enemy's rhythm, move fast or slowly, adjusting you body not too much and not too little.

Carrying the feet is important also in large-scale strategy. This is because, if you attack quickly and thoughtlessly without knowing the enemy's spirit, your rhythm will become deranged and you will not be able to win. Or, if you advance too slowly, you will not be able to take advantage of the enemy's disorder, the opportunity to win will escape, and you will not be able to finish the fight quickly. You must win by seizing upon the enemy's disorder and derangement, and by not according him even a little hope of recovery. Practice this well.

I thought it was interesting that he essentially said, “Walk normally, but be careful that your walking doesn’t get you out of rhythm with the enemy.” Similar to his advice that I previously quoted.

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I have also found it interesting to note that even if we emphasize tsugiashi in kata, when we do randori, we revert back to the more natural ayumiashi and we often have the feeling that we are doing very badly because we can’t make randori work with the type of footwork found in the kata. Working chains more has corrected this for me by showing me that the kata-style tsugiashi is sort of a one-step instantaneous thing. For instance, you might walk around for a while in ayumiashi but then tsugiashi once to push uke. Then you might ayumiashi some more, then throw uke with one more tsugiashi. The ayumiashi has been taken out of the kata for the purpose of boiling each technique down to its essence, but to make it go in randori, there often have to be some “steps between the steps.”
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One more hint related to this - you can often tell if you have gotten a good offbalance on uke because it will reset him from the tsugiashi he's trying to do to the more natural ayumiashi. So, for instance, the pattern of uke's stepping during a release exercise will look like: ayumiashi up to ma-ai then attack through ma-ai with tsugiashi. Tori gets an offbalance and uke reverts back to the ayumiashi, at which point tori blends using ayumiashi (the steps between the steps) then tori switches to tsugiashi to apply a push...

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